I have to admit, this one is not going on my favorite episodes list.
So why did we learn tonight?
Evil-Cooper is difficult to kill.
Nine Inch Nails gets old after a minute or two.
The first atom bomb test set off an alarm on an alien world, and the response was to send Laura to Earth in the form of an insect that infected a young Sarah Palmer (I think).
Some guys jumped around in a garage.
Got a light?
Was that Bob and the Lodge spirits who healed Evil Cooper?
Are we supposed to assume that the atomic bomb somehow created the Lodge spirits?
…
…
…
I think I’m high!!!
…
I don’t know where I am!!!
Am I wrong in thinking that Lynch had difficulty filling out the hour on this one? How much it was devoted to the atomic explosion? I don’t mean the aftermath. I mean the explosion itself.
Not Nine Inch Nails…THE Nine Inch Nails.
And whatever it was, that insect couldn’t be Laura impregnating a young Sarah Palmer. That occurred in 1957, which would’ve been too early. Laura was a teenager in high school in 1990, meaning she couldn’t have been born any earlier than 1971 or 72.
Not impregnating. Infecting. A better word might be “parasitized”. It may have lain dormant until Sarah got pregnant.
But I’m just guessing. I’m assuming that egg was from the orb with Laura’s face that was sent to Earth.
So, on further review
No, I can’t say that I enjoyed that. I felt frightened by it. I felt awed by it. I felt bored by it. I felt, at times, overwhelming anxiety at it. At one point, I had the horrifying feeling that I was the only person viewing it, and that I would go on twitter afterwards and find the rest of the world discussing a comparatively normal Twin Peaks episode. I felt isolated by it.
Once it was over, I described it to my sister thusly. “Imagine you’re sitting down to watch an episode of a fun but weird show - say, Doctor Who. Ten minutes in, the Max Headroom Broadcast Hack begins. But it keeps going for the whole episode. And you won’t turn it off because you might miss something, so you continue to stare into the face of creepy vague malice for an hour.” That’s how I felt.
One things for sure - this is a watershed moment for the series. I expect the ratings will plummet after this. I’m still in.
And the one week hiatus won’t help with the ratings. I wonder what the reason is for the two week wait. My understanding is that the entire series is already in the can.
And by the way; your previous post describes this episode perfectly.
But that still doesn’t make sense (although I’m well aware that this episode was not at all about ‘making sense.’) That mutant insect thing was definitely some strain of evil “wrongness” and Laura is, if anything, a paradigm of perfect goodness. She is the one shining orb of brilliant color in an otherwise black & white alternate universe. And if that was truly Leland and Sarah Palmer, wouldnt’t that creepy critter have crawled into Leland’s mouth? After all, he was the one infected by the parasitic Bob for all those years, not Sarah.
Oh by the way, as one friend of mine pointed out, Agent Gordon Cole has a photograph of that atom bomb text in his own office back in Philadelphia. Connections, baby!
Why was it definitely evil? That’s purely an assumption on your part.
I don’t know about just the explosion but I started skipping through that scene, then when I realized how long it was I went back and checked, IIRC it clocked in at about 17 minutes. That was just a waste of time. I love Lynch, but unless there was something in there that I missed, it could have been filled with something more worthwhile.
One thing I did notice, however, was that there was a picture of an a-bomb in Gordon’s office. Whether it means something or not, I don’t know, but it’s so blatant and we were staring at it for so long last week, it can’t possibly be a coincidence.
Peter Deming, a cinematographer on TP stated that episode 8 would be like no other. Hopefully that will remain true.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BVv61xflMwf/
Not much love here for the most astonishing hour of television ever shown. I have to admit though that this one was for committed Lynchians. I loved every second of it and had to chuckle when I remembered all the critics beforehand saying, oh yes, the first Twin Peaks was so influential and innovative but now so many shows have the Twin Peaks feel that the new one won’t stand out at all. Yeah, right. David Lynch is a genius with balls of steel. Last week the plot is moving along, exposition aplenty, and this week, with TP not back for 2 weeks, Lynch offers a hearty fuck you to those who thought the show was settling down.
The guy is the purest artist in TV, truly art for art’s sake not simply to please the audience.
Excuse us plebians for being bored with a 15 minute explosion.
I don’t mind weirdness. I revel in weirdness. I loved the glass box and the scenes with Cooper in the spaceship (or whatever the hell that was).
Most TV is boring. Lynch is normally anything but boring… normally.
But I found much of this boring. You can drag things out too long.
Okay. We get it. The first atom bomb awakened or created evil beings. Now move on.
Flames and static on our screen is interesting, until you drag it out to the point where it’s not.
The guy sweeping up peanut shells was more interesting.
Some of it was interesting. The scenes in the island castle thing were very creative.
The “got a light” guy was morbidly fascinating.
But a lot of the episode felt like filler to pad out the hour.
Art for arts sake is fine, but it still has to be interesting.
It was astonishing, that much is for certain. That doesn’t make it enjoyable. It was also a bait and switch - I came home from a 13 hour shift at work excited to kick back and enjoy the antics of Dougie and Janey-E, ready to laugh at Gordon Cole shouting things at Albert, or cower from Mr C. Instead what I got was David Lynch’s Rabbits, if it fucked the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
That doesn’t make it bad. I have to give everyone involved credit, it took a lot of balls to green light and air that. But I’m also hesitant to say that it’s good. To be honest, I didn’t understand it. I’ll watch it again today or tomorrow and see if I understand it better, but until I do, judgement mostly withheld.
If, by your own admission, it was meant to be challenging, why are you surprised people didn’t immediately like it?
No, it’s not.
First off, that creature is a mutant creature, not a beautiful angelic being. Given Lynch’s use of archetypal constructions, “good” things appear like, say, a shining globe of warm color in an otherwise black & white world and “bad” things appear misshapen and ugly.
Also, the creature is aided by the Woodsman (the hobo looking for a light) whose broadcast over the radio station puts the whole town to sleep, allowing the creature to enter the girl. The Woodsman is incontrovertibly evil, given what he does to the radio station personnel.
The girl is a wholesome and innocent, and horrible things always occur to wholesome, innocent girls in Twin Peaks.
And finding the penny: once again, given Lynch’s typical juxtaposition of mundane banalities (such as finding a penny and remarking about how it will bring good luck) with pure, unadulterated, capital “E” EVIL, there may as well have been a caption stating “Something HORRIBLE is about to happen to this girl!!!” emblazoned on the screen in bright neon flashing letters. (In fact, when the boy asked to kiss her, I was half expecting him to go full-on Bob and sexually assault and then murder her right there.)
It’s been pretty well publicized that Lynch didn’t make 18 one-hour episodes but rather one 18-hour film, then parsed it into episodes. So this episode wasn’t filler.
Not fair that Evil Coop can’t be killed so easily. What will it take to kill him? Is it that the real Cooper is the only one that can kill him? I guess they didn’t resurrect Leland when he died because Leland was “weak and full of holes.”
NIN was boring but I’m not surprised Lynch liked it. It was reminiscent of the band at the bar in FWWM.
I don’t think I understood much of the b/w scenes with the giant and the woman. I’ll watch those parts again.
The explosion was deadly boring to me but Lynch is gonna do what Lynch is gonna do to make himself happy, not me. I’m glad I can’t think of a reason not to FF through it next time. It wasn’t that impressive on a 42" screen with only TV speakers for sound. Actually, I’m not all that interested in the details of the supernatural aspects of it and how everything came to be. I’d rather see what’s happing in this world.
I liked how the creature really had to work to get into the girl’s mouth instead of going right in.
I appreciated the artistry, but since we’re almost halfway through S3, I’m concerned about all the unresolved plotlines. Principal Hastings is still in jail, that creature is still killing people in NYC, and Chantal is nowhere to be found.
If Ray’s bullet couldn’t kill Evil Cooper, why did Jeffries hire Ray and Darya to kill him?
I’m not knocking people who didn’t like it, taste is an individual thing, mine isn’t somehow superior to yours. I’m just saying that for lovers of Lynch (and I go way back to his experimental shorts) that episode was unadulterated joy, ‘the pure heroin version of David Lynch’, as one critic put it. I wouldn’t fault anyone for being wary of heroin Lynch. 
One thing I will fault Lynch for. I don’t think he realizes, and he has this in common with many, that Trinity was not the awesome event he seems to think it is. In fact as nuclear explosions go the Universe would barely be aware of it. Right next door to us the Sun has been producing thermonuclear explosions daily a thousandfold more powerful than Man’s pipsqueak efforts and it’s been doing it for at least four and a half billion years. The fact that humans produced this one is irrelevant, the cosmic forces involved are identical. Still I can’t begrudge Lynch for imagining Trinity is somehow different since it produces such wondrous television.
I’m not a huge Lynch fan, though I’ve definitely taken more of an interest in him as of late. It’s a rare thing for me to seek out an artist or work whose goal is to evoke negative emotions (including fear - I do not like horror movies), but Lynch is unique in his focus on the audience’s frustration. There’s more to him than that, of course - last night’s episode also included horror, and anxiety, and great wonder and beauty. But I can’t remember the last time I was so invested in an artwork dedicated to withholding anticipatory enjoyment. Dale Cooper is being kept from us in an almost masochistic fashion.
I want to make this clear - I’m invested. I’m in it to the end. But I didn’t enjoy the last episode. I felt something entirely different, and I don’t know what it was yet.
The sun does so without malice. I think therein lies the difference.